{"id":281,"date":"2007-05-04T10:04:43","date_gmt":"2007-05-04T15:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=281"},"modified":"2022-02-16T17:08:06","modified_gmt":"2022-02-16T23:08:06","slug":"preacher-ancient-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=281","title":{"rendered":"Preacher: Ancient History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Nothing like a chasing a densely-prosed and somewhat philosophically themed fantasy brick<\/a> (though it had nothing on Freedom and Necessity<\/a>, I can tell you) with a light, breezy graphic novel. You know, the kind filled with bloody violence by turns deserved and inexplicable, language that would cause a nun who used to be a pirate to blush, and, well, okay, maybe not as much sexual content as usual. So I turned to the fourth volume of the Preacher series, Ancient History<\/a>. (This is actually untrue; rather, of my open series, it’s the one I haven’t read in the longest. But it sounded better the other way, so I’ll probably remove this parenthetical in post-.)<\/p>\n

Anyhow, Ancient History is appropriately named, as it digresses from the main plot to provide backstory on a few of the side characters. From a story progression perspective, I’m kind of okay with that; it allows a couple of our heroes to stay frozen a bit longer on top of the Empire State Building, in their perfect moment in the eye of the storm. From an internal novel perspective, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The first segment is an origin story on the Saint of Killers, who has been an integral piece of the saga from early on. He is a badass’s badass, and his Old West is such a hard place that an entire town’s population is massacred just because killing the responsible parties was insufficient to the task of quenching his rage. I mean, Texas freezes over! That’s a rough landscape, man. Then the second segment is the origin story of Arseface, who in theory will return to the plot before it’s all over. Unfortunately, it really added nothing to my knowledge of the character and seemed to be a little overwrought Gen-Y-style even when I allow for the fact that it’s supposed to be an overwrought Gen-Y story. The third segment is a prequel but non-origin story of some side characters from Until the End of the World<\/a>. It added less than nothing to the main story, as far as I can tell, which should have made it the least good of the three segments. However, it was a hilarious action movie parody, which makes up a lot of ground over potentially relevant but overwrought.<\/p>\n

In the end, I doubt much value was added to the series, but I enjoyed more of the book than I didn’t. So that’s alright at least.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nothing like a chasing a densely-prosed and somewhat philosophically themed fantasy brick (though it had nothing on Freedom and Necessity, I can tell you) with a light, breezy graphic novel. You know, the kind filled with bloody violence by turns deserved and inexplicable, language that would cause a nun who used to be a pirate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-graphic-novel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8058,"href":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions\/8058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}